Where has all the smelt fishing gone?

Back in the late ‘80s, my family would ice fish for smelt on Green Lake near Interlochen.

My father’s cousin and his wife had a sort of pulley rig. You could buy them commercially, but ours was homemade. A chalk line was wrapped around a lathed wooden dowel that hung from the shanty’s ceiling. Attached to the dowel were four coat hangers bent in a W shape.

Connected to the chalk line by a rubber band we cut in half was black fishing line. The rig we used consisted of two hooks tied to the black line by monofilament, and a bell sinker weighted the whole rig down. Pulling on the chalk line spun the wooden dowel hub and spun the fishing line around the coat hangers.

Each angler was in charge of two lines, and the shanty housed six people.

Minnows were the bait, and each time the rubber band stretched, we knew we had a bite. I don’t remember much about fishing for them except it seemed we pulled them in hand over fist.

But some anglers feel those days seem to be fewer and further between.

Walloon Lake is the local go-to lake for smelt, says Dave Stepanovich, owner of Young’s Bait & Party Shop in Alanson.

“Mostly, it’s just been like anything: hit and miss. It doesn’t seem like anything like it used to be,” says Stepanovich. “You just can’t find them anymore. No one is even calling me for pinhead minnows.”

Those days included the mid-1980s, says Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist Dave Borgeson in Gaylord.

“After the mid-80s, it turned more toward alewife, and we’d see the smelt population had gone down, down, down,” he says.

Smelt populations go up and down throughout time depending on the success of their reproduction or the effect predators such as pike or trout have on them.

“We see them going up and down but because sometimes our assessment gear is not attuned to them, we hear more about smelt populations from anglers than anything else — are they seeing (smelt) in the stomachs of the predator fish that they catch?” he says. “Predator and prey: it’s a constant dynamic.”

DNR senior fisheries biologist Tim Cwalinski of Gaylord thinks the cycles of smelt rise and fall in part because smelt are an invasive species.

“Understand that smelt are as non-native as zebra mussels,” he says. “When you add something into a system that has evolved for many years — and smelt are 100 years into our system now — they’re going to be in a really delicate spot. The things that live in that system are not going to be used to them.”

One possible reason for the apparent smelt decline are those zebra mussels. Zebra mussels filter plankton from the water — plankton which feeds a shrimp called diporeia.

As the tiny diporeia move up and down in the water column, feeding on plankton, smelt feed on the diporeia.

It’s a domino effect, says Cwalinski. If the plankton are down, the shrimp are down. If the shrimp are down, the smelt are down.

Smelt must compete for resources that are also being used by fish such as alewife, which smelt don’t compete well with, Cwalinski says. As alewife populations have begun to decline, smelt populations are on the rebound.

Too, where the smelt live matters.

In part, the difference lies in the size of the systems each population is inhabiting. Smaller inland lakes must meet a specific set of habitat requirements. Like trout, smelt require cold, highly oxygenated water to thrive — especially optimal are lakes that have a strong thermocline, says Cwalinski.

A thermocline is a layer of water found within a body that changes temperatures more quickly than the sections of water above or below it. It acts as a buffer zone between the upper, warmer layer of a lake or ocean and the deeper water below it.

The strong thermocline helps keep water oxygenated and cold enough for smelt to survive in.

Many factors converge to bring those populations down: smelt’s non-native beginnings, other invasive species’ affects on established species and competition up and down the food chain. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly the cause of smelt decline.

“In the late ‘80s, when we had peak smelt runs across streams that were tributaries to Lake Huron ... I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to that point,” said Cwalinski. “We’re just not seeing the huge smelt runs like we thought we might.”